Disaster Recovery Guide

A robust DR plan includes the following components:

a) Risk Assessment & Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

• Identify vulnerabilities and potential threats.
• Evaluate the impact of disruptions on business operations.
• Prioritize mission-critical systems for recovery.

b) Data Backup Strategy

• Use incremental backups to capture data changes efficiently and reduce the impact of large data volumes.
• Deploy immutable backups to protect against ransomware.
• Combine on-site and off-site backups (cloud and local) for redundancy.
• Conduct routine backup testing and offsite replication.

c) Recovery Time Objective (RTO) & Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

• RTO: The time it takes to restore systems to avoid significant harm (aim for an RTO of less than one hour for critical systems).
• RPO: The maximum data loss a business can tolerate (target <15 minutes for mission-critical data).

d) Incident Response Plan

• Define alert triggers, escalation paths, and communication protocols.
• Establish containment and mitigation strategies.
• Assign duties for stakeholder, client, and employee communication.

e) Disaster Recovery Procedures

• Provide step-by-step guides for recovering:
• Servers
• Applications
• Networks
• Databases
• Include hardware dependencies, logins, access credentials, and vendor contacts.

f) Roles and Responsibilities

• Assign clear ownership to:
• IT team for technical recovery.
• Compliance team for regulatory adherence.
• Third-party vendors for external support.
• Executive decision-makers for strategic oversight.

g) Testing & Plan Maintenance

• Conduct full DR simulations at least annually.
• Perform targeted tests after infrastructure or policy changes.
• Update DR plans quarterly to reflect business or IT environment changes.